The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 709

00:00:00.000 The U.S. is bombing Syria again. The United States struck two targets in Syria. The Pentagon

00:00:06.700 is saying that this was a decision made not primarily by the military, but all the way to

00:00:11.860 the top by the civilian authority. Some people are a little upset about this, but I think it's

00:00:16.260 very important to point out, I have this on very good information, that the person who dropped the

00:00:21.580 bombs was a biracial, gender confused millennial. So this was a very, very woke and progressive

00:00:29.980 bombing of Syria. Of course, bombing Syria is about as normal as it gets for U.S. foreign policy.

00:00:36.480 So in a way, I think we could all say nature is healing. We are returning to normal as the

00:00:42.780 bombs drop. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:00:52.380 Welcome back to The Michael Knowles Show. My favorite comment yesterday from Frankincensed,

00:00:57.600 who says, as I've gotten older, I've become less and less gay. As a matter of fact, except for a few

00:01:05.560 brief years, since 2009, I haven't been laughing much at all. That's true. You know, I remain

00:01:10.800 pretty and witty and gay myself, despite all of the difficult news out there. But it's true. Words,

00:01:17.260 words really do change their meaning over time. I guess this is actually the primary method by which

00:01:23.740 the left acts. This is the topic of my book coming out, Speechless, Controlling Words,

00:01:28.160 Controlling Minds. And we're sure seeing a lot of it today. One way, you know, amid all of this chaos,

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00:02:40.640 Or you can call 800-651-1148 and use promo code dailywire. Nature is healing. We are bombing the

00:02:48.940 Middle East again. It is. It's, you know, by one standard, this is pretty abnormal, you know, but by

00:02:55.940 the sort of recent American presidency, Trump accepted, he was a bit of an aberration by using

00:03:02.820 Biden now bombing on his 36th day in office, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, you know, bombing the

00:03:11.280 Middle East, uh, not, not so out of the ordinary. I want to talk not just about, uh, this sort of

00:03:19.600 nature of American foreign policy. I want to talk about the war on nature that is going on right now

00:03:25.200 on human nature, uh, through this gender theory. If, uh, if anyone thinks that we focus too much on

00:03:32.760 gender theory in this show, I just want to say I would much rather not waste time talking about how

00:03:39.780 men are men and women are women. The reason we have to do that as conservatives is because this has

00:03:45.380 become issue number one for the left. They are putting as much of their resources as they possibly

00:03:53.760 can behind convincing and coercing every American into believing that men can be women and women can

00:04:01.400 be men. And this has really ugly effects, not just on our self-understanding, but, but on a very

00:04:08.340 practical and technical level, this leads to the genital mutilation of children. This is a harsh reality.

00:04:14.540 The left is denying this entirely, but Rand Paul yesterday, Rand Paul, who I think had his cojones

00:04:22.160 surgically transitioned into steel, decided to bring this up with Rachel Levine, the, uh, I almost said

00:04:30.360 Obama, the Biden appointee to a senior position in HHS, who is a man who believes that he's a woman.

00:04:36.340 A man who believes he's a woman is now in a leadership role at the department of health and

00:04:40.540 human services. And he believes that, uh, we ought to, in some cases, mutilate the genitals of children.

00:04:48.200 So Rand Paul was not going to go down without a fight.

00:04:52.000 Genital mutilation has been nearly universally condemned.

00:04:55.820 Genital mutilation has been condemned by the WHO, the United Nations Children's Fund, the United Nations

00:05:01.840 Population Fund. According to the WHO, genital mutilation is recognized internationally as a violation

00:05:08.780 of human rights. Genital mutilation is considered particularly egregious because, as the WHO notes,

00:05:15.280 it is nearly always carried out on minors and is a violation of the rights of children.

00:05:20.660 Most genital mutilation is not typically performed by force, but as WHO notes, that by social convention,

00:05:28.080 social norm, the social pressure to conform, to do what others do and have been doing, as well as the need

00:05:34.300 to be accepted socially and the fear of being rejected by the community. American culture is now

00:05:40.340 normalizing the idea that minors can be given hormones to prevent their biological development

00:05:44.940 of their secondary sexual characteristics. I am so pleased that Rand Paul is bringing this up.

00:05:52.060 Rand Paul absolutely crushing it. I've said many, many very nice things about Rand Paul over the

00:05:57.200 past several months because he's really standing up on this issue. This is genital mutilation. When you go

00:06:04.340 in and you start tinkering with children's sexuality because of these faddish and ridiculous theories,

00:06:10.900 you are committing a particularly egregious form of genital mutilation. Some guy on Twitter who first

00:06:16.840 discovered this little clip from Rand Paul and popularized it on the internet, he said, oh my goodness

00:06:22.000 gracious, he's a Daily Beast reporter. He says, Rand Paul is likening gender transition surgery to

00:06:29.140 genital mutilation. It is literally genital mutilation. What you do is you mutilate the

00:06:35.100 genitals. Now, I'd like to anticipate the arguments and I don't even need to anticipate them because I

00:06:41.220 did see some people commenting on this yesterday from the left. It's difficult to define what

00:06:46.740 mutilation is in our society because in order to understand what mutilation is, you have to understand

00:06:51.380 what things are for, right? If I get heart surgery, let's say that there's something wrong with my

00:06:56.120 ticker and I get heart surgery. They're going to go in with some scalpels and push things around,

00:07:00.680 but that's not mutilation. If I need my appendix out or something, that's not mutilation.

00:07:07.840 Mutilation is specifically something that causes injury, causes damage, makes something less perfect.

00:07:16.740 Well, what is perfection? It's when a thing is doing what it is meant to do. So if I need heart surgery

00:07:23.240 and they go in and they put a stent in my heart or something, that's not mutilation. That's making

00:07:26.980 my heart more perfect. It's making my heart do what it is supposed to do. If I go in and turn

00:07:32.280 little Johnny's manhood into little Jane's simulacrum of womanhood, that is almost the

00:07:42.880 textbook definition of mutilation. You are taking a perfectly functioning organ. You are then destroying

00:07:48.880 it. You are preventing it from doing what it is supposed to do and turning it into something else.

00:07:53.660 But in our culture, because we basically throw our hands up in the air and say, well, we don't know

00:07:58.000 what's good or bad and we don't know what things are for and we, who am I to judge, you know, what,

00:08:02.760 what that's for? We can't really make that argument quite as well. It is knowable through our faculties

00:08:08.780 of reason from nature. We know what the eye is for. The eye is for seeing. The eyes in their

00:08:14.320 perfection can see. When the eyes can't see, there's an imperfection that's called blindness.

00:08:18.800 And we, we don't think that blindness and sightedness are equally perfect. We recognize

00:08:25.320 that some, one of those things is a disability because the eye is meant for, for a purpose.

00:08:30.040 So I actually do want to grant the left's premise here a little bit, or I don't want to grant the

00:08:34.520 premise. I want to point out that the left genuinely can't understand what we mean when we say that if you

00:08:41.080 turn a well-functioning organ into some, I don't know what, to look like another kind of organ,

00:08:47.120 that is a mutilation. And the nominee here from Joe Biden doesn't seem to understand that.

00:08:54.400 Dr. Levine, you have supported both allowing minors to be given hormone blockers to prevent

00:08:59.560 them from going through puberty, as well as surgical destruction of a minor's genitalia.

00:09:05.920 Like surgical mutilation, hormonal interruption of puberty can permanently alter and prevent

00:09:10.520 secondary sexual characteristics. The American College of Pediatricians reports that 80 to 95 percent

00:09:16.920 of pre-pubertal children with gender dysphoria will experience resolution by late adolescence

00:09:23.440 if not exposed to medical intervention and social affirmation. Dr. Levine, do you believe that minors

00:09:31.000 are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one's sex?

00:09:35.480 Well, Senator, thank you for your interest in this question. Transgender medicine is a very

00:09:41.960 complex and nuanced field. Stop it. Stop it right there. You've already given the wrong answer.

00:09:48.960 If the question is, do you really support destroying the sexual organs of children and mutilating them?

00:09:56.560 If your answer is not, no, no, what are you talking about? If your answer is, well, you know,

00:10:01.540 it's complicated. You've already given the wrong answer. And unfortunately, this is not just at HHS.

00:10:05.860 This is now being enshrined into law. This ideology has been marching on and on and on,

00:10:11.060 gradually, then suddenly. You saw it affirmed by the Supreme Court. Thank you again, Neil Gorsuch.

00:10:16.500 It was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Bostock decision, which effectively redefined legal

00:10:21.160 protections for sex, you know, boys and girls, as protections for sexual identity, meaning they destroy

00:10:27.900 the protections for boys and girls, right? Because if, if, if you have a protection for sexual identity,

00:10:33.020 then you no longer have a protection for sex. If the protection for sex means that girls get their

00:10:38.100 own sports leagues, but the protection for sexual identity means that boys get to compete in those

00:10:42.320 sports leagues, then you've just lost girls' sports leagues. You've just lost the prior legal

00:10:47.280 protection. This comes with the House's passage of the Equality Act. The Equality Act is one of these

00:10:53.740 laws, there are a lot of laws like this, sort of like the Patriot Act, which they, they sound so

00:10:58.540 unimpeachable that if you don't support it, the Patriot Act, you're not a patriot. And if you don't

00:11:02.520 support the Equality Act, you, you're, you hate equality or something like that. The Equality Act is

00:11:08.520 the most radical legislation we have ever passed in this country. It redefines these protections into law

00:11:16.440 now. It redefines these protections on sex for sexual identity and, uh, gender identity rather,

00:11:23.500 and sexual orientation. This will practically, if it is voted on in the Senate, which hopefully it won't

00:11:30.300 be. And if it's, uh, signed into law by Biden, this will practically eradicate any distinction between men

00:11:38.640 and women in the law. Will it be actually put into effect? I certainly hope not. But this is as

00:11:46.240 significant a cultural upheaval as we have ever seen. This is Rachel Levine defending the genital

00:11:51.340 mutilation of children at a committee hearing, or rather at a, at a testimony on a national legislative

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00:13:12.860 care of your family. Head on over to select quote. This crazy gender theory has become somehow the

00:13:23.540 defining issue of our time. When the left says that transgender rights or the civil rights issue

00:13:28.240 of our time, a lot of conservatives, we roll our eyes. They're right in a certain sense. I don't think

00:13:35.340 that there's any real comparison between racial bigotry and the belief that a man is a man and a

00:13:43.180 woman is a woman, but it has become a defining issue, which means we live in a very stupid time. If this

00:13:48.340 is the defining issue of our time, we live in a very stupid time, which means we have to get to

00:13:53.540 the most important story of the day. Mr. Potato Head. For a few hours yesterday, Mr. Potato Head

00:14:00.640 lost his sex. We were told by Hasbro that Mr. Potato Head would no longer be Mr. Potato Head.

00:14:08.840 He would just be Potato Head. So much for respecting people's preferred pronouns. When we found out that

00:14:15.100 Mr. Potato Head was being canceled, I was scurrying to the Daily Wire legal department. I was running

00:14:21.200 to Jeremy the God King Boring's office. I said, we have got to sign a three picture deal. We need to,

00:14:27.660 we need to start working with Mr. Potato Head now. We need Mr. Potato Head to come on the Sunday special

00:14:31.860 and give his side of the story. But then a few hours later, after this controversy was raging,

00:14:37.640 Hasbro came out and corrected the record, said, hold that tot. Your main spud, Mr. Potato Head,

00:14:44.620 isn't going anywhere. While it was announced today that the Potato Head brand name and logo are

00:14:50.100 dropping the Mr., I am proud to confirm that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head aren't going anywhere and will

00:14:57.080 remain Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. Ah, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the potatoes get to

00:15:05.740 keep their secondary sexual characteristics. If they are, what those are, I don't know. And I really

00:15:11.360 don't want to know. I suspect that the Mr. Potato Head gender controversy was a marketing ploy.

00:15:23.940 I, I don't, there are only two options here. Either Hasbro really wanted to castrate the potato and then

00:15:30.720 there was so much pushback that they decided they were going to let him keep that particular

00:15:35.560 attachable appendage. Or they realized that we live in a time that is so tense and so on edge and

00:15:44.000 there are all these controversies and particularly around this issue of sex and gender. And they were

00:15:48.760 going to exploit that by pretending to give into this gender ideology, but then pulling back on it.

00:15:57.860 And the reason I think this is, when was the last time you were talking about Mr. Potato Head?

00:16:04.700 I, I for one can't remember the last time I mentioned Mr. Potato Head or even remember that

00:16:09.860 Mr. Potato Head exists. And now we're thinking about it. This matters because companies realize

00:16:17.020 this is at the top of people's minds. And, and the way you market is you go where people's minds are,

00:16:23.060 you try to gin up controversy and then you can sell your product. The potatoes are not the only,

00:16:29.500 only toy and a product that is, is doing this. Oreo cookies, the marketing team behind Oreo cookies

00:16:37.440 getting in on it as well. Oreos tweeted out yesterday, quote, trans people exist.

00:16:43.440 My first reaction to Oreo's bold statement here was, you are a cookie. Why, why am I listening

00:16:54.840 to the philosophical declarations? Why am, why am I listening to the Gnostic dualist theories

00:17:03.740 of a delicious sandwich cookie? I don't know because we're living in a very, very stupid time

00:17:10.720 where everything has to be politicized. You know, this was, I, I hate, as you know,

00:17:17.160 to keep plugging my book, but providentially my book happens to be about all this stuff that's

00:17:21.500 going on like right this very minute. And this was the plan of the people who pushed political

00:17:28.280 correctness. It was to politicize all of the terms, all of the things beginning with,

00:17:34.860 in Karl Marx's words, the ruthless criticism of all that exists, which develops then into critical

00:17:40.280 theory, which you see a lot on college campuses. Now we've heard a lot about critical race theory

00:17:44.000 into the feminists of the 1970s who said that the personal is the political. Every intimate

00:17:49.980 interaction between everybody, everything, your cookies, your coffee mugs, your sneakers,

00:17:56.880 your relationship to your husband or wife, everything has to be open to public scrutiny now

00:18:01.640 and politicized, including Oreos, including Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head. So now Oreo cookie,

00:18:09.280 when you eat the Oreo cookie, you are making a political statement. Speaking of black and white

00:18:15.540 issues, how is that for a segue? Barack Obama is, is pursuing this kind of divisive strategy,

00:18:22.600 not on the sexual front, but on the racial front. Obama is back. He's as radical as ever.

00:18:28.060 However, he was asked about this question of reparations on his, his new, absolutely insufferable

00:18:35.840 podcast with Bruce Springsteen. We now should, I think we should outlaw podcasts. I know that I

00:18:42.420 host a podcast. It is my main job. I don't, I don't care. Springsteen and Obama, it's gone too far.

00:18:49.700 I, I, and I know we're for freedom and whatever. I don't care. I'll be an authoritarian. We need to,

00:18:54.120 we need to ban this. This is too insufferable to be permitted in society. Barack Obama on this

00:19:01.300 podcast was discussing reparations for slavery, a radical and sort of ridiculous proposal by the

00:19:07.780 vantage of 2021. Obama says that the reason we never got reparations, the politics of white resistance.

00:19:15.440 What I saw during my presidency was that the politics of white resistance and resentment,

00:19:27.280 the talk of welfare queens and the talk of the undeserving poor and the backlash against affirmative

00:19:38.100 action. All that made the prospect of actually proposing any kind of coherent, meaningful reparations

00:19:51.320 program struck me as politically, not only a non-starter, but potentially counterproductive.

00:20:04.660 Because of those white people with their resistance and their resentment, we couldn't get

00:20:11.040 reparations. Now, first of all, I love too, that he lumps affirmative action in there as though it's

00:20:19.020 somehow unnatural to resent having a disadvantage when you're applying to college or, or a job. You

00:20:26.220 know, yes, there's, it's the politics of Asian resentment that they don't accept affirmative action

00:20:31.080 at Harvard and Yale, that they don't accept being disadvantaged by the admissions committee

00:20:35.300 because of all their very white Asian privilege or Asian white privilege. I don't know. I'm very

00:20:40.500 confused, but he's also just wrong on the facts here. Black people do not support affirmative action

00:20:47.080 or do not support reparations overwhelmingly either. So according to a Reuters Ipsos poll from 2020,

00:20:53.620 one in five Americans generally said that we should use taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of

00:21:00.840 enslaved people in America. One in five people believe this. Eighty percent of Republicans oppose

00:21:08.060 reparations. Two thirds of Democrats are not supportive of reparations. Ten percent of whites

00:21:16.060 are supportive of reparations. Only half of black people are supportive of reparations. This is a very

00:21:24.180 radical view and a proposal that is supported by a very small number of Americans. And it doesn't

00:21:31.820 break down cleanly on racial lines. If, if what Barack Obama is saying is true, then you'd say

00:21:37.760 basically no white people support reparations, which is essentially true, but all the black people

00:21:42.500 support reparations. That's not true. Only half of black people support reparations. And the overwhelming

00:21:48.460 majority of Americans oppose it because it's an incoherent policy. He says, you know, in order for us to

00:21:53.280 have a coherent policy, we would need all this white support. There is no coherent policy.

00:22:00.840 Slavery was abolished 150 years ago. You, you already, even at the time of emancipation, you would

00:22:08.440 have had a little bit of trouble with reparations, but at least you could, you know, 40 acres and a

00:22:12.760 mule. You could have done it. But now generation after generation after generation, many people descended

00:22:18.200 from slaves. Many people also, many of those same people descended from white people. The,

00:22:24.660 we've mentioned on this show before, the first officially declared slave owner in the American

00:22:28.340 tradition was a black Angolan guy named Anthony Johnson. That's kind of weird. Do his descendants

00:22:32.720 get reparations? Do recent immigrants from Africa get reparations? It'd be very difficult.

00:22:39.040 How do you prove that sort of thing? But the, the real distinction here is not a racial one. It's

00:22:44.160 a radical one. People who share Barack Obama's radical politics and people who do not. Speaking

00:22:49.740 of things that black Americans are not totally sold on, it would appear that many of them don't

00:22:55.320 want to get the vaccine, which we will get to in just one second. First, I got to thank our friends

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00:24:00.360 year that I can say this, happy Feb you hairy. Now go treat yourself to some beard oils. There is an

00:24:07.480 article in the FT, Financial Times, the fight to overcome vaccine hesitancy among African Americans.

00:24:17.040 A tide of misinformation and centuries of medical malpractice have led to wariness about the COVID-19

00:24:24.400 jab. And the Financial Times goes on and writes a very sort of sympathetic article about this.

00:24:33.300 So this issue of black people being a little bit skeptical of the vaccine in America, this is being

00:24:41.280 treated as, well, you know, it's totally understandable. Black people have endured a long

00:24:47.100 experience of medical experts deceiving them and getting things wrong. And so therefore they're

00:24:55.420 skeptical. And this is true. And for black people, it's true in specific ways. It's also true for all

00:25:01.200 the rest of us. We've just gone through just this past year, the experience of the most prominent

00:25:08.100 medical expert in the world, lying to us. Anthony Fauci, remember? So Anthony Fauci, at the very least,

00:25:16.160 we can say he got things wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong again. But

00:25:23.000 I'm also pretty certain that he lied to us because you remember early on in the, in the pandemic,

00:25:30.240 what did Fauci say about that? He said, there's no reason to wear a mask. You do not,

00:25:34.640 you don't need to wear a mask now. It won't protect you from anything. Stop buying the masks.

00:25:40.940 Don't wear them in public. Then about five seconds later, he said, you have to wear the mask.

00:25:47.940 We said, well, hold on. Why do you mean I have to wear the mask? You just told me I shouldn't wear

00:25:51.280 the mask. What changed? And his example was, I'm paraphrasing, but only slightly. He said, well,

00:25:57.280 you understand. At the time when I said, don't wear a mask, they don't do anything. I wanted to save

00:26:03.320 all the masks for the nurses. I didn't think that you filthy peasants deserved any masks.

00:26:09.080 So what I did, you understand, is I lied to your face and I told you not to do it. And then I gave

00:26:14.980 all the masks over to the nurses. But then when I saw we had enough, I decided that I could tell you

00:26:19.820 to get the masks. So believe me, good old Dr. Fauci. That's what he said. Slightly different words,

00:26:27.000 but that was what he conveyed. So yes, I think everybody in this country, regardless of their race,

00:26:31.840 has had this experience of medical experts being wrong and in some cases being dishonest.

00:26:39.280 Add on top of that, that we have a vaccine, very impressive. It was developed in six months.

00:26:44.900 That's pretty weird. Vaccines take a very long time to build. And I'm not saying that the vaccine is

00:26:51.540 terrible or awful, or it's going to cause all these problems, though obviously people have had

00:26:55.480 reactions to the second shot. I'm not saying that I would never consider getting the vaccine.

00:27:00.460 I'm not saying that if I were 90 years old, I wouldn't seriously consider getting the vaccine.

00:27:05.300 But I am saying that skepticism is understandable. Frankly, it's warranted. Aren't we always supposed

00:27:12.480 to be skeptical of the scientific process? I just wish that there weren't this double standard where

00:27:18.620 when black people have that perfectly reasonable skepticism, they are treated as these totally

00:27:24.840 reasonable, reasonable, wonderful people, you know, following their best lights. And when white people

00:27:30.560 or anybody else does it, we're considered monsters and serial killers. Speaking of support for things,

00:27:38.340 it's a little bit of a weak transition. Mitch McConnell was just asked about 2024. Mitch McConnell,

00:27:44.040 you know, he didn't like Trump. Then he kind of worked with Trump. Then he threw Trump under

00:27:48.880 the bus, especially after the Capitol riot. Now McConnell is being asked in 2024, if Trump is the

00:27:57.740 nominee, would you support him? This comes as Liz Cheney, a kind of minor member of house leadership

00:28:05.240 says Trump should have no say in the future of the Republican party, no say in the future of the

00:28:10.380 country. McConnell asked, would you support Trump? The guy doesn't hesitate. There's a lot to happen

00:28:15.440 between now and 24. I've got at least four members that I think are planning on running for president,

00:28:20.120 plus some, some governors and others. There's no incumbent, should be a wide open race and fun

00:28:26.100 for you all to cover. If the president was the party's nominee, would you support him?

00:28:32.560 The nominee of the party? Absolutely. When I support the nominee of the party? Absolutely.

00:28:38.840 Of course, this is the right answer. Romney probably would not support Trump if he were the nominee

00:28:46.780 because he, he is truly never Trump. But even Romney said, I think it's very likely that if

00:28:52.380 Trump ran, he would win the nomination in a landslide. And so this does really call into

00:28:58.640 question people like Liz Cheney, who claim to be in leadership, but all they seem to be doing is

00:29:03.140 dividing the Republican party. This is something that we all do, particularly those of us who are

00:29:09.620 in conservative media, who write articles or books or, you know, have podcasts or things like that.

00:29:15.280 We always focus on the differences, the distinctions between different types of conservatives.

00:29:21.260 And I think that's very important. And it's how you transform the direction of the party and you try to

00:29:26.380 fix it and make sure it's going the right way, not the wrong way. But if you are an elected Republican,

00:29:31.740 you need to be on the team. I mean, you are on the team and you, and you really need to

00:29:37.220 support the team. And I think this is true of all of us, really, just to a lesser degree.

00:29:43.620 Conservatives are really good at pointing at all the little minute differences that we all have,

00:29:48.040 but we do need to come together at a certain point. Otherwise, we're just not going to be able

00:29:51.760 to win any elections or do anything. And it's all going to be just a bunch of freshman dorm room

00:29:55.800 bull sessions when we talk about all the grand plans we have while the left destroys the country.

00:30:00.760 The person who probably did this most successfully in American history was William F. Buckley Jr.

00:30:06.720 when he founded the post-war conservative movement. And now it's very fashionable to attack

00:30:10.960 Bill Buckley because, because I think people actually are attacking Buckley-ism, sort of what

00:30:17.080 his followers decades and decades later claim, rather than Buckley himself, who was actually

00:30:22.620 quite conservative and a pretty serious guy, pretty, pretty strong spine in that fellow.

00:30:28.500 What Buckley was able to do was unite these disparate factions of the broader right, bring them

00:30:36.580 together and actually win and actually get some things done. Was his record of accomplishment,

00:30:43.360 was it perfect? Was it a hundred percent? We got everything we wanted? No, but he,

00:30:46.700 he did win his fight. You know, I mean, he did accomplish a lot in his time. Now it's up to us.

00:30:51.660 And I just do think it would be helpful, even as we're parsing out our differences and figuring out

00:30:56.740 where the party should go, if we could actually bring people together because the left is playing

00:31:01.580 for keeps. You know, I know that we're supposed to say that the 2020 election was absolutely perfect.

00:31:06.560 There was nothing wrong with it. There was no reason to question it whatsoever.

00:31:09.420 I'm not someone who has said that, but I know we're, that's what we're told by the big tech

00:31:16.000 tyrants. No way that we should question anything about, you know, the way the vote was conducted

00:31:21.820 in Pennsylvania or how they violated the state constitution. Actually, that's pretty weird,

00:31:26.200 but no, can't question it. Stephen Crowder went out and uncovered quite a bit of evidence of

00:31:34.840 voter fraud. Now I'm not, I want to be very careful with what I'm saying. I'm not saying

00:31:39.360 he uncovered evidence that the election was illegitimate. I'm not saying he uncovered evidence

00:31:42.760 that, you know, this was a total by Trump actually won. I'm just saying he uncovered evidence of

00:31:48.160 fraud and now people are trying to shut him up. Now, what I want to focus on is something that I

00:31:53.380 would swear under oath, penalty of perjury, what I'm about to present to you because dominion isn't

00:31:58.580 needed. I'm not saying that nothing nefarious happened with dominion. I just can't confirm it.

00:32:02.680 I can confirm to you that these people voted from it or who may or may not be real people

00:32:07.720 voted from addresses that do not exist. So just because I don't address some issue relating to

00:32:13.580 voter fraud doesn't mean that I don't believe there's foul play. I do have to unfortunately

00:32:18.300 hold ourselves to the standard of doing our due diligence and only confirming what we've seen

00:32:22.960 with our own eyes. By the way, let's contrast that with the left. What does the New York Times have

00:32:27.100 to say? What does MSNBC have to say? No evidence of voter fraud. Well, really? Have you looked through

00:32:31.180 the voter listings? Have you gone to these addresses? Right. There's no burden of proof on

00:32:36.000 them. I highly recommend you head on over, check out, check out Crowder's episode on this. It's

00:32:41.060 excellent as are all of his episodes, but this one in particular, the liberal establishment

00:32:47.780 is bearing down on us in a way that we haven't seen before. They are reverting back all the way back

00:32:54.940 to the old sort of classical establishment foreign policy with that slight aberration kind of under

00:32:59.820 Trump. They are ramping things up though. They're ramping things up on the gender ideology. They're

00:33:06.480 ramping things up on the legislative front. They're wrapping things up on the bureaucratic front and

00:33:11.920 they are ramping things up on big tech. Steven Crowder was kicked off of Twitter. I think only

00:33:16.060 briefly, but he was kicked off of Twitter for saying that. They have so much power here. We need to be

00:33:22.300 unified if we are ever, ever going to try to push back on that because this is an aggression,

00:33:28.440 not just on some of our political traditions, but on nature itself.

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00:34:00.860 ensure your title is still in your name. If you know, there's a whole lot of narratives around hot

00:34:04.400 topic issues right now. It's very difficult to keep track of all the newest controversies and

00:34:08.320 non-troversies that the left decides to be offended by. You know, you can get ready to challenge all of

00:34:15.360 this with the daily wires, newest show soon to be released debunked or Ben exposes leftist fallacies

00:34:20.380 in 15 minutes or less climate change, universal healthcare, COVID policies, facts, and logic versus

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00:34:31.520 aren't already a member, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe, use code debunked to get 25% off. You

00:34:37.100 do not want to miss Ben. So use code debunked for 25% off today. We'll be right back with the mailbag.

00:34:43.240 All right. My favorite time of the week, the mailbag. First question from Matt.

00:35:00.260 Future bureaucrat of the DeSantis administration, Knowles. Wow. That's a title I haven't heard before.

00:35:05.120 Should conservatives start getting behind one candidate for 2024 now, such as Governor DeSantis,

00:35:10.800 if conservatives can unite as you've talked about. Wow. Oh my God. Oh, I got to put a pause there.

00:35:15.720 I did not plan that. I cannot believe how perfectly that first question came out of what

00:35:20.440 we were just talking about. Great stuff. Absolutely providential. Nature is but art unknown to the

00:35:26.180 chance direction, which thou canst not see. Getting back to his question, should we unite as

00:35:30.980 you've talked about so that we can be successful in 2022 and 2024? Is there a benefit to waiting for

00:35:36.260 another 16 candidates to run during election season as the GOP did in 2016 and Democrats did

00:35:41.680 in 2020? I think there is a benefit to having a bunch of candidates run in the primary. I am a

00:35:48.800 supporter of primaries. And the reason for this is, well, look, we had as many candidates run or more

00:35:56.920 candidates run than we ever have had in the Republican party in 2016. And what happened?

00:36:00.640 They all bloodied each other up and they really bloodied up Trump and then Trump won in the

00:36:05.040 general. That process of bloodying everybody up actually seems to have helped. It's a process the

00:36:12.980 author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, might call anti-fragility. The more you beat people up,

00:36:17.800 the stronger they get. I think that's generally true of politicians. The other reason here, I mean,

00:36:23.580 you mentioned Ron DeSantis. I think Ron DeSantis is really a terrific governor. He's doing an excellent

00:36:28.580 job and I think he would be a very interesting candidate in 2024. But the thing about DeSantis

00:36:34.960 is the thing about all sorts of politicians that we don't know much about. We see their strengths

00:36:41.780 when they jump onto the scene, but we don't necessarily know their weaknesses yet. That's

00:36:45.900 the point of a primary process. So if Ron DeSantis does run, then we're going to start to see that.

00:36:51.960 I've compared Ron DeSantis right now to Chris Christie. And some people think that's an insult.

00:36:57.220 It's not an insult. I'm comparing him not to Christie in 2016 or 2020, but Christie in 2012

00:37:01.840 when he was, I felt, a very formidable candidate for president. He ended up not running. And we

00:37:07.840 sort of found out why he didn't run because he had a lot of weaknesses, particularly around that time.

00:37:13.060 And they came out and I think changed our view of him. I'm not saying there's anything like that

00:37:20.240 for Ron DeSantis. I'm just saying that you need a primary process because if you don't, if you just

00:37:25.420 pick someone who looks really, really good, then you're going to get to the general election and

00:37:30.120 you might be in store for a big surprise. I also think there are at least two or so other candidates

00:37:39.040 who could be very serious, very attractive contenders for 2024. I won't necessarily get

00:37:46.560 into the horse race yet. It's so early. There could be candidates that we haven't even

00:37:49.760 heard about yet, but I'm definitely pro-primary. From Alexa, Michael, my boyfriend and I love your

00:37:56.140 show. I'm so pleased to hear that. Thank you. You have excellent taste, both you and your boyfriend.

00:38:01.020 We're attorneys practicing in Missouri. Last year, the Missouri Supreme Court added a continuing legal

00:38:06.340 education requirement for attorneys to obtain at least one CLE credit hour by attending a cultural

00:38:13.020 competency, diversity, inclusion, and implicit bias program. I've attached a picture of one of the

00:38:17.860 most woke slides I've ever seen. These people are teaching attorneys that there should be two

00:38:22.400 standards in criminal cases because the beyond a reasonable doubt standard is racist. We'd love to

00:38:27.480 hear your thoughts on this BS. Thanks. Yeah, this is absolutely insane, but it is what's happening all

00:38:36.140 over the place. I think the answer to this is going to be getting in the weeds here. And what I mean by

00:38:45.000 that is not just yelling about how dumb diversity training is or any of these sorts of things,

00:38:50.100 or not just talking about how actually sort of bigoted these issues are, you know, to say that

00:38:55.700 beyond a reasonable doubt is racist, that, you know, to say, to say the things as, as for instance,

00:38:59.940 the Smithsonian Institution has in other places, that objective reality is anti-black or something,

00:39:06.040 hard work is a white supremacist term or, you know, those terms in and of themselves,

00:39:10.840 or those ideas in and of themselves are quite bigoted. But instead of just yelling about that,

00:39:15.340 we need to get in the fight. I was talking to my friend Carol Swain yesterday, who lives here in

00:39:20.160 Nashville. And Carol, terrific conservative voice and thinker, Carol is proposing her own kind of

00:39:28.460 training called unity training, right? We have diversity training. She's proposing unity training.

00:39:34.160 I think this is a great idea. And what it does is it doesn't just complain and criticize. It gets in the

00:39:40.520 weeds and say, okay, we're going to have to have some kind of stupid training in corporate America.

00:39:43.660 We're going to do the conservative one. We're not going to do the insane radical leftist one.

00:39:47.880 And it's much harder, I think, for the left to fight that because the vast majority of people are

00:39:54.420 not paying attention to this sort of thing. And so if, if the left has advanced by being the loudest

00:40:02.220 and the most forceful and just getting their ideas through, because most people don't want to take

00:40:07.060 the time to deal with them, then if the right comes in and says, okay, you've got to do some

00:40:11.620 kind of training. We're all accustomed to that now. You've got diversity training. We can do unity

00:40:14.880 training. If the, if the right can do that, I think there are going to be a lot of conservative

00:40:18.480 business leaders, people in government, people in various associations who will opt for that.

00:40:25.400 So they get the sort of optics of doing the training and they can check that box for most people,

00:40:30.020 but they'll get the better substance. I would get in there. I would, we were talking the other day on the,

00:40:33.900 on the backstage show. Conservatives need to embrace lawfare. Conservatives need to go in and say some

00:40:40.000 things are right and some things are wrong. We need to get much more serious and the old throw your

00:40:44.480 hands up, you know, we can't use the government at all. We can't engage in politics. That, that idea

00:40:50.560 that we've had from like 20, 2000 to 2020, got to get rid of that. From Nick. Hey, Michael,

00:40:58.600 big fan of the show. However, I'm also a big fan of Ron Paul. I saw your critique of

00:41:03.820 his views on drug legalization on Twitter this evening. I was wondering what your views were

00:41:07.560 on marijuana. Also, do you believe regulations on it should be more stringent than that of alcohol

00:41:12.300 or tobacco? Thanks so much. I, I don't love marijuana, you know, definitely had it a number

00:41:21.180 of times in my wayward youth was never my, my favorite. I much prefer booze and tobacco to

00:41:27.920 marijuana. Uh, so I don't, I don't take a puritanical view of it. Uh, but I, I think this

00:41:33.480 is actually my issue here, uh, when it comes to, to the kind of libertarian response on drugs,

00:41:42.200 which is I go with the libertarians on so many policies. I agree with them on so many policies,

00:41:47.260 but then you get to something like drugs and it reveals that we're beginning with different

00:41:50.140 preferences, which is, I think libertarians look at the drug issue from this very rationalist,

00:41:56.800 very, uh, abstract perspective where they say, you know, through all this kind of ideological musing,

00:42:05.620 I have determined that I have a natural unalienable right to smoke pot. And if you infringe on my right

00:42:12.500 to smoke pot, this is a grave injustice. And we, you know, we're not a just society if we do that sort

00:42:18.140 of thing. My approach to marijuana is, is it good or bad? Is it good or bad? Now, some libertarians

00:42:29.220 will then say, well, the moment that you take into account a conception of the good or the bad in

00:42:34.480 society, you've, you've gone off the rails because, you know, the left is going to say this thing is

00:42:38.920 good and the right is going to say this thing is good and it's authoritarian and you're coercive and

00:42:42.620 you shouldn't do that. All political regimes have some conception of the good. Even you,

00:42:50.660 Mr. Libertarian, who are saying we need this kind of regime because that expands freedom the most,

00:42:55.860 that is asserting a particular vision of the good. Actually though, even on a deeper level,

00:43:02.660 liberty only makes sense if you have a conception of the good. Because what is liberty? Liberty is,

00:43:10.280 you know, just a very practical way. It's how we, we intuit the good, right? We have a, some sense of

00:43:16.540 what is good for us and then we pursue that. We have freedom of choice to go and pursue that.

00:43:23.780 We can get deeper on liberty, but that's kind of the basic thing. You, liberty doesn't make any sense

00:43:28.880 if you don't first presuppose a conception of the good. And so I, I don't favor legalizing marijuana

00:43:35.720 or, or making the, it easier to get. Not because I have some abstract, absolute ideological opposition

00:43:43.160 to it or, or even on the contrary support of it. I just think, yeah, it's not good. It's sort of foreign

00:43:48.580 in the American tradition. You know, in, in the West, we've had booze for a very long time and it's served

00:43:53.740 us well and it's, there have been some excesses and we've kind of wrapped our minds around it and

00:43:58.420 wrapped our livers around it. You, you know, Christ's first miracle is turning water into wine. You know,

00:44:03.540 booze plays an important role all the way throughout our history. Marijuana is kind of

00:44:10.480 a more recently introduced thing. So I'm just a little wary of it. I'm a little skeptical of it

00:44:14.120 and I don't see any reason that we should introduce it. I mean, it might be good for the,

00:44:18.920 for big Doritos, you know, might be good for the munchie industry, but I don't really see

00:44:24.140 what it does for society. And so I just have a much less rigidly ideological take on this.

00:44:30.300 And I think generally speaking, I love libertarians. I think they're right on so many

00:44:34.360 things, but I think if libertarians were a little bit less ideological and a little bit more practical

00:44:39.320 and a little bit more in tune with the tradition and just given into prudence, which is a very

00:44:44.820 important virtue. I think that the, the, the two camps here would come together much more quickly

00:44:51.520 and we'd have a much more sane politics. You know, the different, Edmund Burke writes about this,

00:44:55.800 the difference between the English and the French is that, and the, the difference between the

00:45:01.280 American revolution and the French revolution is the French revolution was totally abstract and all

00:45:04.960 about these random rights floating in the sky. And the American revolution understood rights and

00:45:09.500 understood these kinds of philosophical questions, but it was much more grounded in a practical

00:45:14.940 tradition. And I think we should stick with that. From Austin, I love your show. Appreciate any advice

00:45:20.780 you can offer. When my wife and I got married, I was a Christian in name only, and she was an atheist.

00:45:25.800 We agreed to raise our children as Christians around six months ago. Thanks to you and Matt

00:45:29.640 Walsh, I started taking my faith seriously and converted to Catholicism. Oh, terrific. Very

00:45:33.740 glad to hear that. Since then you've changed many aspects of my life. I've asked my wife that when we

00:45:39.740 have kids to go to church, to participate in the service, pray with them, not tell them that she's

00:45:43.780 an atheist and live as a Christian, although she isn't one. Understandably, she thinks this will make

00:45:48.360 her miserable. She has no interest in converting. She wants me to handle the faith aspect of raising our

00:45:53.520 children. We argue about it frequently, and it puts a strain on our relationship. Am I wrong for

00:45:57.880 expecting this of her? And if I am, do you have any advice or suggestions? A tricky situation, but

00:46:03.100 we've all been there. Well, maybe not all of us, but I certainly have been there in the sense that

00:46:09.860 my wife and I have known each other since we were 10 years old. We have at times believed very

00:46:15.320 different things. And actually, we used to believe very different things than even what we would believe

00:46:18.820 now. And what happens, I've noticed, is you either grow together or you grow apart. You are the head

00:46:26.140 of your household and you should be the head of your household. And especially if you're taking your

00:46:30.440 faith seriously, because there's a whole lot about this in the Bible. Your duty is to love your wife

00:46:38.260 and to lead your household. And so I totally sympathize with her. This is not what she signed up for.

00:46:45.580 She did not sign up for this Catholic family. And so she might be a little freaked out by it. She might

00:46:52.400 be a little freaked out by all the smells and bells at mass. And I think that's understandable and

00:46:57.080 you should respect that. But the thing about the faith that I suspect has helped you come to it

00:47:02.160 and come to it more seriously is that it is reasonable. We can know the existence of God

00:47:09.020 through our faculties of reason from nature. This is in the catechism. You can read your Thomas

00:47:16.280 Aquinas. So I think it should be very clear if she has an open mind and faculties of reason that she

00:47:22.500 should come to recognize that God exists. Once you realize God exists, then you have to ask questions

00:47:27.240 about God. You have to deal with the reality of Christ and you have to determine what you think about

00:47:34.940 the incarnation and claims of the resurrection and what that means. And I just, I was an atheist for

00:47:41.420 10 years. So I totally understand your wife's holdups. But then I committed myself to studying

00:47:49.720 the question and I came to this answer, you know, and I think reasonable people will come to that

00:47:56.640 answer. And in the meantime, you've got to love your wife. So I wouldn't, you know, I don't think you

00:48:02.200 should be bickering about this all the time, but direct her to the Thomistic Institute, for instance,

00:48:06.420 on YouTube. Direct her to Patrick Madrid's show on the radio and you can get it on podcast.

00:48:12.220 It's a great call in Catholic show. Direct her to the catechism. Direct her to catholicanswers.com.

00:48:17.560 I think Catholic Answers is a great resource. Direct her to various resources that can maybe help her

00:48:22.960 understand this and keep the faith and lead your household. And I think it will serve you very well.

00:48:29.700 All right. Last question. I'm going to fit one in right at the end from Jerome Providential to

00:48:33.760 great saint who translated the Bible. I appreciate the work you do. I have one question. Is it possible

00:48:37.920 for committed conservatives who aren't independently wealthy to run for and win state or national

00:48:42.700 elected office without selling themselves to interest groups? For instance, I don't see how I

00:48:46.560 could win office without millions of bucks in the bank to insulate myself and my family from the

00:48:50.640 economic harm that the left dishes out. No, it is not. For very local offices, it is. For bigger

00:48:56.040 offices, it's not. So it's much easier. You, you've, you, you're much more likely to be able

00:49:00.220 to keep your integrity. If you've got at least a little money in the bank, if you don't, that's

00:49:04.060 fine. You need to have wealthy friends who are not going to pressure you to completely change your

00:49:09.640 point of view. It's very, very tricky. And so you should, you should work on making sure if you are

00:49:16.740 interested in running for office, that you are insulated from some of those threats because they

00:49:20.480 come after a whole lot of people. That's our show. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show.

00:49:23.900 See you Monday.

00:49:53.900 Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show. You know, some people

00:50:23.880 are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's

00:50:28.500 turned to blood. But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started. So come

00:50:33.120 on over to The Andrew Klavan Show and laugh your way through the fall of the republic with me,

00:50:37.320 Andrew Klavan.

The Michael Knowles Show - February 26, 2021

Ep. 709 - War On Nature

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